The Center for Environmental and Rural Health (CERH) at Texas A&M University was created to support state-of-the-art research in the environmental health sciences and to translate this knowledge into concepts and principles that can be easily adopted by rural communities in the State of Texas and beyond. The CERH provides administrative infrastructure and technical support to foster multidisciplinary research into basic mechanisms of environmental disease, from the gene to the organismal level, from molecules to social factors. The research activities of Center investigators have been clustered into four major areas: Biostatistics and Community Health, Chemical Biology, Nutrition, and Reproductive and Developmental Biology. Each of these Research Cores consists of senior and junior investigators representing multiple departments and programs throughout the University. The funded research of these investigators is enhanced by six Facility Cores that provide resources to assist with experiments involving the use of Analytical, Biostatistics and Computational, Genomics and Bioinformatics, Imaging, Protein Chemistry, and Transgenic technologies. The Pilot Project Program supports up to 5 exploratory research projects per year related to the research focus of the Center. A Community Outreach and Educational Program provides a mechanism for dissemination of important research findings of CERH investigators to rural communities, especially in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.